longhand

Longhand

Persistent local memory for Claude Code. Every tool call, every file edit, every thinking block from every Claude Code session — stored verbatim on your machine. Searchable, replayable, and recallable by fuzzy natural-language questions. Zero API calls. Zero summaries. Zero decisions made by an AI about what's worth remembering.

Claude Code quietly rotates your session files after a few weeks. Longhand captures them into SQLite before they're gone. Once ingested, your history stays forever — even after the source JSONL files are deleted. Install early; the past you don't capture is unrecoverable.

If you have 20+ Claude Code sessions in ~/.claude/projects/, Longhand can search across every fix, decision, and conversation you've had in ~56ms — without a single API call.

Does it use a lot of tokens? No — every tool is capped by design. A full recall across 100+ sessions returns ~4K tokens. Reading one raw session JSONL costs 10–50× more. See Token budget.

pip install longhand
longhand setup        # ingest history + install hooks + configure MCP
longhand recall "that stripe webhook bug from last week"

Want to kick the tires first? Run longhand demo for a 60-second walkthrough on a fake 3-session sample corpus — your real ~/.claude and ~/.longhand are not touched. The demo seeds a sandboxed store with a Stripe-webhook bug + Supabase auth migration + downstream 401 fix, then runs cross-session recall and project-status so you can see what the output looks like before committing.

pip install longhand
longhand demo         # sandboxed; cleans up afterwards (pass --keep to explore)

Upgrading to 0.13.0? Nothing breaks — this release opens the v1.0 deprecation window, so every old name keeps working while pointing at its replacement:

• status is now the single resume command: bare status = recent digest (was recap), status <project> unchanged, status --session <prefix> = session tail (was continue). The old commands still run and print a pointer; they're removed at v1.0.
• Six MCP tools folded into six survivors with identical parameters (search_in_context → search + context_events, get_episode → find_episodes + episode_id, etc. — full table in the CHANGELOG). The retired names still answer, prefixed with a migration note.
• Hooks can no longer exit nonzero — failures become breadcrumbs in ~/.longhand/logs/ and two new doctor rows (Hook errors, Transcript format) keep them visible.
• "Today"/"yesterday" recall windows now follow your local calendar day instead of UTC's; rankings may shift once if you're not in UTC.
• Windows users: this release fixes a serious bug where the ingest-lock liveness check could terminate other longhand processes.
• New: LONGHAND_DATA_DIR relocates the store for the CLI, hooks, and MCP server in one move; status --json / doctor --json for scripting.

Upgrading to 0.9.0? Live ingestion captures sessions in flight, plan history is preserved as first-class data, and an optional reconciler job keeps the index honest in the background:

• New longhand ingest-live command runs from Claude Code's Stop hook to tail the active transcript between assistant turns. Sessions show up in recall while you're still working, not after they end.
• New longhand plans list command and list_plans MCP tool surface every Write/Edit to ~/.claude/plans/*.md across your entire history. Plans are now extracted as their own entity alongside episodes.
• New longhand schedule install-reconciler installs an optional launchd job that runs reconcile --fix periodically — catches anything the live and post-session hooks missed without you ever thinking about it.
• The Stop hook coexists with the existing SessionEnd hook: live tails the transcript as it grows; SessionEnd does the full analysis pass when the session closes.

Upgrading to 0.8.1? Staleness signals now propagate everywhere they belong, and reconcile is an MCP tool — Claude can self-heal the index from inside a session: